Page 25 of Wyatt

Slava was still gasping for breath and York debated a second before he walked over, looked into Slava’s eyes, and shook his head. “Tell Gustov that Iwillfind him.”

Slava’s mouth was moving, but York didn’t stick around to listen just in case the two had friends. He swiped his phone and his wallet off the desk and headed out of the building.

Vasily’s fist had opened up the blood at his mouth, and his jaw burned, but he hustled down the hallway, pushed through the door, and found himself on a side street somewhere in Moscow.

Past midnight, given the waning of the stars, although they were hard to see against the lights of the city. A wind picked up the dust and grime littered in the alleyways, and not far away, he heard the rumble of a tramvai, the city train.

He needed a taxi to the airport because right now Kat was meeting Wyatt Marshall, handing over life-, no, world-saving information, and he needed to convince her to go with him.

Back to America.

Find RJ. Stay safe.

Let him handle Damien.

Except, he had this gut feeling, given his call to Kat some twenty-four hours ago, that she had a different escape plan.

“Wyatt? I’m meetingWyatt?”

He wasn’t sure why this was such a big deal—according to RJ, they were family friends. So, “Yeah, meet Wyatt. Give him the USB drive, and do what he says.”

Maybe it was that last part. Kat failed theTakes orders wellpart of her kindergarten evaluation. She had her own mind—and a quick, sharp one at that.

If only she’d stayed on the phone longer, he might have convinced her. After all, at the time she was giving him Damien Gustov’s hidden home address, something she’d tracked down from the massively hidden but hackable IP address on Gustov’s emails to RJ, the ones where he set her up to be accused as a killer.

York had tucked the phone in his pocket, attached his earpiece, and quietly broken into Gustov’s high-rise apartment building. Five upscale rooms, with a kitchen that looked out of the space age. Black furniture, brass lamps, spare, tidy, and precise.

Exactly what he expected for the private domain of one of the world’s most lethal assassins.

He’d found the burner phone in a safe in the office, one that Kat had helped him hack into, thanks to the digital entry, and that’s when he hung up.

Because he’d found a call list and needed the help of David Curtiss, or more specifically, his wife, Yanna, who yes, had the initials FSB in front of her name, but was as invested in finding the killer as York was.

He’d returned to his safe house to wait while Yanna tracked down the contacts—all five of them—and discovered one of them had booked a flight to Khabarovsk in the last twenty-four hours.

She’d sent York pictures on his cell phone and it turned him cold. The woman had long dark hair, tattoos up her arm, and right in the center of the back of her neck, an eight-pointed star.

A Bratva woman—rare and lethal.

A closer look at the tattoos on her arm—a rose with barbed wire wrapped around it—told him she’d been in prison before she was eighteen.

He’d been dialing Coco again when Slava tased him.

His not-so-gentle wakeup came at the other end of Vasily’s beefy fist.

York hadn’t a clue how long he’d been down, but he looked like he’d spent the night in an alley. So maybe no decent cabbie would pick him up.

As he ran toward the metro station, he knew three things in the pit of his gut.

If Kat wasn’t on a flight to the US, then she was in serious trouble.

Damien Gustov was in the wind.

And Yorkwasgoing to survive this and find the woman he loved—no, not loved, but maybeneeded—no matter what it took.

NowCoco felt like a fugitive. Funny, it wasn’t until she packed her backpack—her only possessions her laptop, external hard drive, a handful of necessary cables, headphones, a sweatshirt, and change of clothing—that she felt as bereft as she appeared to be.

Wounded. Her hair dyed a raven black, and she’d lost weight. A glance in the hall mirror told her that it only turned her more gaunt. No wonder Roman was worried about her when he dropped her at the train station. So worried that—

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